Thursday, July 19, 2018

Despite the absence of shared public
spaces, the serious environmental problems and the lack of centralized urban
planning that characterize it, and despite the recurring political violence
that marks its history (Hermez 2017), Beirut’s inhabitants of all classes, even
if in different ways, often speak of a quasi-mysterious but nonetheless
tangible “buzz,” a sense of “quiet pleasure,” a type of urban jouissance, woven into the texture of
the city’s everyday life. What is more, this jouissance is seen as closely
entangled with rather than in opposition to the sense of chaos and uncertainty
that the city is able to produce in people. Lebanon’s semi-chaotic social life
partly mirrors its economy. Someone, long ago now, defined Lebanon’s laissez faire capitalist economy as laissez tout faire, so bereft of any
government regulation it is. The economic anarchy which allows investors and
developers to pursue profit with little regard to the social, urban or
ecological consequences of their investment is replicated in the way religious
communal organizations, political parties and groups as well as individuals
behave socially and politically in everyday life pursuing their interests with
little regards to their impact on the collectivity. This is often found
exasperating, and is part of what gives Lebanon’s periodic civil wars their
particularly chaotic form. “Shoo hal
fawda b’hal balad!” (What a chaotic nation this is!), “Ma fi nazam b’hal balad!” (There is no law and order in this
nation!) or “Ma fi dawleh!” (There is
no state!) are exclamations/moanings that are commonly heard. But it would be a
very poor ethnographer indeed the one who does not notice that, without
diminishing in any sense the general sense of exasperation that these
exclamations contain, or the fact that they point to real often encountered
problems, they nonetheless, and at the same time, contain a kind of mischievous
enjoyment of the very chaos that they are bemoaning.

I refer to this enjoyment as “jouissance”
because of its mischievousness but also because people speak of it as a state
of the body just as much as a state of the mind. Of course, like everywhere
people spend their time bogged down in the grind of everyday life worrying
about practical and financial realities. And more than everywhere, people will
be crankily caught up in an impossible traffic jam or trying to negotiate a
transaction with the state bureaucracy. Yet, despite and alongside all this, people
are able to express a certain joy in maneuvering through these very
difficulties. And more predictably, on a quite evening alone or with family and
friends, walking on the Corniche, having an arghileh
(water pipe) in a café by the sea, or just sitting having a smoke and a coffee
with the concierge and a few others in front of one’s apartment building, or having
a man’ousheh in the morning and
taking cover underneath someone’s balcony as the rain starts falling, people
will readily tell you that “there’s something about this place.” A fisherman near
Beirut’s Manara (lighthouse), who began by relating a variety of personal and
financial problems he encounters on a daily basis finished by telling me “life
is hard but every time my friends come and we play a game of cards by the
sunset here, all my problems disappear, even the traffic behind us (GH: I was
complaining to him about the traffic) seems like a nice traffic.” “I have the
best of friends and this must be the most beautiful sunset in the world” he
said. “Where else in the world did you see the sunset?” I asked, somewhat
naively and genuinely wanting to find out. He hesitates for a second before turning
his head and replying, “I haven’t been anywhere.” I inadvertently embarrassed him. “But it must
be one of the most beautiful sunsets in the world, don’t you think?” he asks
with a sense of pleading. “Yes” I said. “the most beautiful sunset and the most
beautiful traffic.” Something I, being after all a Beiruti at heart, actually
deeply believed.

While it is important to remember
that almost everyone expresses these feelings every now and then, it is also
the case, for obvious sociological reasons, that the more unburdened people are
from the dismal local wages people receive, the uncertainties of the future, the
effect of pollution, the weight of class, patriarchal, racial, bureaucratic and
clientelist arbitrariness and domination, the more willing they are to be
effusive about this “something,” this, “mellow and yet intense feeling at the
same time” in the words of a man I was chatting to on the Corniche. Thus it is
not surprising to note that middle-class Westerners who come to live in the
city for extended periods of time have often expressed similar feelings. In her
book Once Upon a Time in Beirut, the
Australian journalist Catherine Taylor (2007) describes living with her husband
Matthew in Beirut for a number of years while working as a Middle East foreign
correspondent for an Australian newspaper. She reflects:

Matthew and I would often talk about
why we liked Beirut so much. After all, it was polluted and chaotic and noisy.
Don’t even start on the traffic. The politics was turbulent and sometimes
dangerous… And… it was quite an expensive place to live... It was the little
things, we decided, that we loved. The upside of chaos was that regulations
were sporadic. We could drink cocktails hanging off the edge of a tower block
with a view of the ocean; drive the wrong way down a highway when all other
routes were closed and break the speed limit (what speed limit?). The pace of
life itself was slow and rhythmic, soothing and full of things to like... We
would wonder out loud to each other if perhaps it was simply that Beirut’s
extremes exaggerated everything, made every moment seem alive. (233–234)

There is also a whole genre of light
touristic journalism, regularly appearing in the international press, celebrating
the way Beirut keeps being a city of enjoyment despite war and chaos, though
without being based on long term experiences of life in Beirut. Radical
activists and academics often bemoan this type of journalism and the clichés it
circulates. They rightly see it as mystifying the serious problems Lebanon is
facing. The way it is criticized, however, ends up itself being so absolute that
it negates the fact that this reporting does point to a jouissance experienced
by many. After all, mystificatory and light-weight as they might be, these same
journalists do not write the same touristic thing about every single city. What’s
more, such journalists are hardly the only ones who inflate their experience of
this Beiruti enjoyment. Indeed, no one expresses this jouissance with as much
conviction as returned immigrants, particularly (but not only) middle class
returnees, who carry with them the economic and ontological security that they
have internalized elsewhere in the world and who come to Beirut with a nostalgic
desire for an imaginary Beirut where the enjoyment of anarchy and chaos is a, if
not the, central feature. It is the experience of such a group of returnees that
will be the main empirical focus of this paper. It should be clear from all of
the above that I don’t see this enjoyment of Beirut as specific to the culture
of returned immigrants. What is specific is the clarity and intensity with
which it is present in this milieu, and which allow us to better understand the
phenomena in question.

This paper can therefore be seen as a
contribution to both an urban anthropology of Beirut and an of Lebanese
diasporic culture. At the same time, however, it should be noted that urban
anthropology and diasporic anthropology in general, have been more sociological
and explanatory in their intent. That is, they have been anthropologies that
participate in the general sociological endeavor of explaining and
understanding as best as possible the nature and the dynamics of urban and
diasporic phenomena. Anthropology here does not differ from sociology or any
other sociologically-oriented discipline in its general analytical intent. It only
diverges in terms of methodology and, in terms of the dimension of the
phenomena that it chooses to analyze and emphasize. It is worth noting in this
regard that with the exception of the thorough doctoral work of Kristin Monroe
(2016), which explores the role of capitalism, corruption, and patronage in
shaping the informal and unplanned character of urban space, some the best
critically and theoretically-informed, sociologically-oriented and ethnographically-based
studies of Beirut’s urban culture is neither the work of sociologists or
anthropologists but of academics working at the intersection of architecture,
urban design and politics (see the work of Fawaz [2009a; 2009b] and Harb [2010a;
2010b]). My approach here differs from this not so much because of a lesser
commitment to the sociological project, but more because I want to wed it to what
I consider a more specifically critical-anthropological quest for radical cultural
alterity (Hage 2015). This can be summed up with one guiding question: in what
way does the study of a particular socio-cultural phenomena expand our
knowledge of the plurality of modes of existing in the world? Though not concerned with radical alterity as
such, the work of AbdouMaliq Simone (2004) offers, in a general sense, a
similar direction. Studying something as intimately part of our everyday life,
and as connected with capitalism and modernity as Lebanese urban and diasporic
cultures are today, is not usually the ground on which such a classical
critical anthropological question is asked. Indeed it is more often associated
with “exotic” or “primitivist” anthropology where alternative forms of
existence to our own are usually found. So there is something akin to a disciplinary
challenge behind engaging in such an approach while studying diaspora. Therefore,
notwithstanding the desire to elucidate certain dimensions of Lebanese urban
and diasporic life, it is important to remember that it is this search for “another” sociality that is the primary
driving intellectual quest behind this paper. As a necessary corollary of this,
is the willingness to “do” anthropology (in the philosophical sense of the
word) with one’s ethnographic material. This is similar to what Holbraad and
Pedersen (2017: 80) describe as the “willingness to stage the encounter with
ethnography as an experiment in conceptual reflexivity.”

When confronted with the expressions
of jouissance such as those noted above, it would be easy to see in them a mere
individualized libertarian enjoyment of an excess agency, akin to the urban
Dionysian experience described by Ulf Hannerz (1981), but magnified by the
absence of any systematic law-regulated forms of sociality. But, to be clear,
we are not dealing with mere chaos here. Firstly, because state laws in Beirut are
never completely absent. They are merely selectively or incompetently implemented,
both in terms of where and on whom they are implemented, and with what degree
of tenacity and intransigence. Secondly, and as importantly, even when the
state’s capacity to implement the law was at its weakest during the civil war, Beirut,
except perhaps in the war zones proper, never descended into pure chaos.
Indeed, while it is more customary to speak of how unruly and chaotic Lebanon
is, the more astonishing, though less dramatically experienced, fact is how ruleful
and disciplined it remains despite all the wars and the inability of the state
to adequately govern and uphold the law. Everything continues to function:
services, shops, traffic, schools, everyday social life, etc. – not
wonderfully, indeed often very badly, but functions without collapsing
nonetheless. It is this capacity of society to continue being one, to offer
possibilities of everyday forms of relationality, co-existence and considerate
interaction, in the shadow of the state, as it were, that invites us to think
the presence of another,
outside-the-law, mode of sociality that allows for the continuation of social
life.

Anthropology, more so than other
disciplines, has always had to come to terms with forms of sociality that are
not based on state regulation of law and order. As James Scott (2009) notes:

Until shortly before the common era,
the very last 1 percent of human history, the social landscape consisted of
elementary, self-governing, kinship units that might, occasionally, cooperate
in hunting, feasting, skirmishing, trading and peacemaking. It did not contain
anything that one could call a state. In other words, living in the absence of
state structures has been the standard human condition. (3)

And there is particularly a long lineage
of anthropological work highlighting the “horizontal” sociality of the gift in
opposition to the “vertically mediated” sociality of the state. The contrast
between state-based and gift-based forms of social relations is already
well-explored in Marcel Mauss’ classic work The Gift (2002 [1925]) and by
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) after him who saw in reciprocal sociality the
“elementary” organizing principle of kinship. This lineage continues via the
work of Pierre Clastres (1987) as well as Marshall Sahlins’ masterful analysis
of Mauss’s work in Stone Age Economics
(1972), where he argues that: “Where in the traditional view the contract was a
form of political exchange, Mauss saw exchange as a form of political contract”
(169).

This paper sees itself as a
contribution to this anthropological lineage, arguing that it is to such
outside of the state form of sociality that the jouissance we have introduced
above takes us to. To begin to do so we need to bravely enter the world of
Beirut’s traffic, for nowhere is this sociality more present than in the way
people have to negotiate the city’s streets.